For years now, without an iota of proof, Pakistan has blamed the unrest in its restive Balochistan province on neighbouring India. In interviews, Pakistani ministers such as Ijaz-ul-Haq and President Pervez Musharraf made orchestrated attempts to implicate India, accusing it of fomenting the insurgency. This was despite Musharraf having sent the army to Sardar Akbar Bugti’s hideout in the mountainous retreat of Kohlu to eliminate him in 2006, lighting the match that inflamed Baloch resistance. And all this happened while Baloch separatist leaders never failed to openly and repeatedly express their disappointment at India’s refusal to back their cause.
This Tuesday’s unprecedented attacks by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRG), when it targeted the hideouts of Sunni terror group Jaish al-Adl in Pakistani Balochistan, and Pakistan’s swift retaliation barely 48 hours later raining bombs on alleged hideouts of the Balochistan Liberation Front and Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) in Iran’s Sistan-Balochistan province finally put paid to the earlier piece of fiction.
India must and will no doubt make political capital out of it. Iran’s missile strikes on the Jaish al-Adl’s hideouts in Balochistan’s remote interiors strongly reinforce India’s strident accusations at international forums of Pakistan being a terror haven for a plethora of jihadists with multiple loyalties and agendas. They already include the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Islamic State Khorasan, and the trio nurtured by Pakistan’s ‘deep state’ to strike deep within India—Jaish-e-Mohammed, Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.
But now, as Iran and Pakistan circle each other, the far bigger question is whether the widening arc of conflict will escalate and further inflame the region. Iran’s military has already set in motion an annual air defense drill that will see the IRG unleash its firepower from the eastern port of Chabahar—which lies perilously close to Pakistan’s sensitive, China-run Gwadar port along the 900-km shared border—across Iran, right up to its western boundary with Iraq.
Coming as it does only days after Iran unleashed a series of retaliatory drone and missile strikes deep into Syrian and Iraqi territory, many see the Iran-Pakistan tit-for-tat attacks as having the potential to escalate into a wider regional conflict. Pakistan is a nuclear state. Iran, close to enriching its uranium to produce a nuclear bomb, is no wannabe. It aspires to be the leader of the Islamic world and has never shied away from its ambitions to do so.
The activation of a triad of Iranian proxies, who have been steadily upping the ante in recent weeks, beginning with the Hamas attack on the Israeli kibuttzim abutting the Gaza Strip on October 7, is therefore no accident. The insurgent group poses a hitherto-unseen challenge to the Jewish state that has all but destroyed Gaza in retaliation, but short-sightedly sown the seeds for a widening insurgency within the Arab world and beyond.
It has already spurred the Hezbollah in southern Lebanon to prey on Israel’s vulnerable northern border close to the Valley of Tears. Similarly, the Houthis in Yemen—a Shia force that recruited young men from madrassas across Yemen and nurtured and trained them in Iran into a fighting force—are no pushover. Armed by Tehran and given access to the theocratic state’s intelligence network, the Houthi militia are boarding and attacking Israeli- and European-owned shipping vessels, interdicting vital shipping lanes at the mouth of the Red Sea, at the Bab-el-Mandeb, putting international trade routes at risk.
Iran’s missile strikes against the Jaish al-Adl, a spinoff from its earlier avatar Jundallah, were sparked no doubt by the anger in Tehran over the Sunni militant group’s repeated attacks on police outposts, with the latest in December 2023 at Rusk village that killed 12 policemen.
But Iran’s blind eye to the Baloch rebels who have taken refuge in its Sistan-Balochistan province, its safe haven to thousands of Afghan émigrés seeking refuge from the Taliban government, including the family of the Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massood after his assassination, are a stratagem to keep multiple insurrections in play.
Pakistan’s recent crackdown, enforced disappearances and attacks on Baloch separatists protesting across the restive state, which drew trenchant criticism worldwide, challenges the Pakistan army’s writ in the province. The new Taliban dispensation in Kabul, which seems to be unable to put the TTP genie back in the bottle, is the other. The TTP has not only preyed on the army, but its agenda is to carve out an Islamic state that will have Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa as its hub. The BLA, similarly, seeks to carve out a state from Iran and Pakistan. Sending Afghan refugees back to Afghanistan is Pakistan’s ploy to destabilise their former proxies.
Pakistan may also now play the Iran card. Just as it tried to recently to cash in on the threat posed by the TTP, using it as a bait to get the US to re-invest in Pakistan’s army, and failed, it may raise Iran as the new bogey in the Middle East.
The Davos summit saw the Pakistani Prime Minister Anwaar ul Haq Kakar and Iranian Foreign Minister Hosse in Amir-Abdollahian meet a day before the Iranian air strikes. Was it a classic Iranian feint?
US President Joe Biden, facing off against an unsinkable Russia and now an Israel that refuses to back down over Palestine, has called for restraint. But he is under no illusion that Tehran will play by Washington’s rulebook.
It is Iran that is now setting the agenda, be it on derailing archrival Saudi Arabia from recasting the Middle East giving Israel a seat at the high table, on safeguarding Syrian President Bashar Al Assad and the Shia regime in Iraq, and upping the ante if Israeli continues with its plans to bury a nascent Palestinian state.
This may be Pakistan’s second cross-border attack on a neighbour. The first was when it downed India’s fighter jets and captured an Indian pilot in February 2019, when the Indian air force jets levelled a terror haven in Pakistan’s Balakot. Rawalpindi must know, just as Washington does, that Tehran too is not to be trifled with. Or it would risk a conflagration it cannot douse.
Neena Gopal, Foreign policy analyst